RE: st: Suppress labeling of categorical axis values in graph bar/hbar

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

There's an ancient Stata saying that if -graph bar- seems to block your path, back up and try an equivalent approach with -twoway bar-. 

Your example can be attacked with 

sysuse auto, clear
sort price
gen order = _n
labmask order, values(make)
twoway bar price order, horizontal yla(8 44 71, val ang(h)) ytitle("")

The mystery command here is -labmask-: see 

SJ-8-2  gr0034  . . . . . . . . . .  Speaking Stata: Between tables and graphs
        (help labmask, seqvar if installed) . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
        Q2/08   SJ 8(2):269--289
        outlines techniques for producing table-like graphs

for more detail and, especially, more on the generic problem here. You don't need -labmask- to get what you want. A direct approach would be 

sysuse auto, clear
sort price
gen order = _n
twoway bar price order, horizontal yla(8 "Renault Le Car" 44 "VW Diesel" 71 "Linc. Versailles", val ang(h)) ytitle("")

However, there are problems in which -labmask- cuts down mightily on what you have to type. 

To get the correspondence 8 "Renault Le Car" etc. you have to look at the dataset after ordering. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Davide Cantoni
==============

Eric -- thanks for your reply. It is somehow convincing me that I am
almost as well off by typing out the relabel() option manually.

The other thing I wonder is how to get rid of the numbers on the
categorical axis. In your second code, which works fine, there are
still the ordinal numbers of each observation, instead of the names,
left. There's no way to suppress those?

Eric Booth 
==========

> I think that working with the relabel option is your best bet.  You can automate
>  the creation of the  relabel() expression with a loop, but normally I'd suggest
>  building it in a local macro , but I couldn't get the local to store the double
> quotes for use in the relabel option.
>
> Here's some examples of things I tried:
>
> ***!
> sysuse auto, clear
> forval n = 1/`=_N' {
>        loc la1 `la1' `"`n' " " "'
>        loc la2 `la2' "`n' " " "
>        loc la3 `la3' `n' `" "'
>        loc la4 `"`la4' `n' " "'"'
>        }
> forval n = 1/4 {
>        di in y as smcl "`n' {hline}"
>        di in g "`la`n''"
>        }
> ***!
> Anyone have an idea of how to store the double quotes  in a local to pass to the
> relabel option?
>
>
> Since using the local didn't work for me, here's a less straightforward solution
> using a couple of string variables (which are limited to 244 chars) to do essentially
> the same thing:
>
> ***********!
> sysuse auto, clear
>
> foreach v in "1/15" "16/30" "31/45" "46/60" "61/74" {
> **get variable name**
> loc varname `v'
> loc varname: subinstr local varname `"/"' "", all
>
> **create "o" vars with relabel option**
> g o`varname' = ""
> forval n = `v' {
> if !inlist(`n', 1, 20, 40, 60 , 74)  ///
> replace o`varname' = o`varname' + `" `n' " " "'
> if inlist(`n', 1, 20, 40, 60 , 74)  ///
> replace o`varname' = o`varname' + `" `n' "`=make[`n']' ""'
>  }
> }
>
> ds o* //<-- Here's the new vars for relabel()
>
> graph hbar (asis) price, bargap(10)  ///
>  over(make, relabel(`=o115' ///
>  `=o1630'  `=o3145'  `=o4660'  `=o6174')  ///
>  label(angle(horizontal) labsize(vsmall) labgap(5)))
>
> ***********!
>
> After kludging all this together, it might be more work than typing out
>  the relabel()  for 74 obs in the auto.dta;  however, it would be useful
> for much  larger datasets.  (However,  you can't get too much larger
> before  the bars become indistinguishable.)

Davide Cantoni
==============

>> I would like to draw a bar chart displaying the values of a given
>> variable for all the observations in the dataset. However, since there
>> are many observations, I would like to label only some of them (some
>> representative cases). Conceptually, this is similar to this working
>> example:
>>
>> *** begin example
>> sysuse auto, clear
>> graph hbar (asis) price, over(make, sort(price))
>> *** end example
>>
>> As you can see, putting all the labels on the categorical axis leads
>> to overcrowding. What I would like to do is to label only some
>> representative examples, e.g. only "Renault Le Car", "VW Diesel" and,
>> say, "Lincoln Versailles".  I guess I can achieve the suppression of
>> labels with some relabel() command inside the over() parenthesis, but
>> given the large number of observations, this would be incredibly
>> cumbersome. Any other suggestions?

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